search that had followed. Eight-year-old Eliza Sewell, a resident of one of the narrow medieval alleys known as the Rows, had been sent on an errand by her mother. Her four-year-old sister was in her charge. The bottle shop was no more than ten minutes’ walk away, but she’d neither arrived there nor returned home. The abandoned younger child had walked into a neighbor’s house, where she said nothing of what had happened. She played with the neighbor’s children and no one raised the alarm until midevening, when the oldest boy took her back to her own home.
Each Row was a close-knit community. Neighbors could, quite literally, lean out of their windows and touch each others’ houses. There was a large turnout of volunteers to join in the search. All that the four-year-old could say was that Eliza had been spoken to by a woman, and had gone off with her. In another part of town, a signwriter had seen a brown-haired child walking toward the docks with a similar-sounding woman and a man. He described the woman as looking like a witch, with layer upon layer of ragged clothes. The man was thin-faced with a shaven head.
The search concentrated around the docks, and the worst was feared. Several shaven-headed sailors were dragged out of public houses, and a Swede who spoke no English was thrown onto the cobbles and beaten.
LITTLE ELIZA FOUND SAFE AND WELL
The second news clipping picked up the story a couple of days on. Eliza had been found by the late-night police patrol. She was wandering in the town’s deserted marketplace at two o’clock in the morning. By this time, she’d become “Little Eliza” in print and in the public’s imagination, and her fate was the subject of speculation in every backyard and taproom. The reporter’s language was oblique, but Sebastian’s reading of it was that she’d been found barefoot and without clothing.
Under the heading of ELIZA’S OWN STORY, the child’s account was reported. Eliza, though eight years old and unschooled, appeared to speak with the kind of rhetorical flourish appropriate to the middle-aged editor of a provincial English newspaper.
A woman had stopped the two children by the gates of St. Joseph’s Church. She knew Eliza’s name. She said that she was a dressmaker, and Eliza’s grandmother wanted her to have a new dress for the next Whitsun walks. Eliza would have to be measured. Her mother knew all about it, she said. Her sister was to return home. Both would get a penny for being good.
When she turned to go with the woman, Eliza saw that a man had moved in to stand behind her. The woman explained that he was a friend of her grandmother’s. He showed her the pennies. They walked toward the docks and Eliza remembered passing the signwriter, who was lettering gold leaf onto the painted glass of a moneylender’s window.
They took her to a place near the ships and up some stairs into a big dark room at the top of the building, where Eliza described being able to see the big timbers that held up the roof. A beautiful lady was waiting there.
This lady smiled at her and said that the man had two pennies, one for Eliza and the other for her sister. Eliza could have them when she’d tried her new dress on. She couldn’t see any new dress. She didn’t want to take her clothes off, but the woman who’d brought her changed her manner and spoke sharply, and she was frightened.
She did as she was told. Then the beautiful lady asked her if she would like to be clean. Eliza said that she
Something in what she said seemed to upset the lady. She stroked Eliza’s hair, and would not look at her. She told the woman to give Eliza her clothes back.
Then it all turned ugly. The man grabbed the lady by the arm and drew her away. They started to argue in low voices, all three of them, and the beautiful lady began to cry. Nobody noticed Eliza creeping away. She got down to the next floor and, when she heard someone coming down the stairs, she hid under some sacks. It was the younger woman, the so-called beautiful lady. She hadn’t entirely stopped crying, but now her face was all twisted and red. She carried a sharpened stick or a pike of some kind, and she went from room to room with it calling Eliza’s name.
Eliza was too frightened to answer. She heard rats in the sacks around her. When the young woman was out of sight, she got out of the pile and hid behind a dresser instead.
The young woman came back. She heard the rats and mistook them for Eliza. She plunged the pike into the sacks, sobbing all the time, and kept on plunging it in until the man and the other woman came. They took the pike out of her hands. The shaven-headed man moved the sacks to look for a body, but found none. They gave up after that. When they led the young woman away, they had to hold her up.
Eliza waited for several hours, and then found her way out of the house and through the empty streets to the market.
An enthusiastic hunt for the three adults was now under way, the report said.
Sebastian returned the clippings to the place in the Bible where he’d found them. Something had clearly gone wrong. The child had never been meant to survive Louise Porter’s attentions, much less be able to tell the tale and describe her to others. The Silent Man and his wife—not so mute, if she’d done all the talking—had set up the child’s fate in a manner so heartless it was hard to imagine.
Louise had wavered, and had to be bullied into seeing it through. But once she got started, she quickly went out of control.
Sayers could idealize her all he wanted. But in Sebastian’s eyes, she was only one act of cruelty away from becoming another James Caspar.
Sebastian took the
He couldn’t decide whether she looked disturbingly young, or disturbingly old. The world had changed considerably in the space of fifteen years, and a sepia photograph like this one had the feel of another era altogether. Anyone pictured from those times—babies, even—made him think of them only as those who’d passed by long before. How might she seem now? She’d be well into her thirties. Good Lord, she was practically an old woman!
Unless, of course, life mirrored the legend, and she had not changed in any appreciable way.
There was a knocking at the door. Sebastian quickly restored the fighter’s possessions to their former order and went downstairs.
There on the doorstep stood Mr. Oakes from the office, a parcel of brown paper and string under his arm.
“Mister Bearce has been called to Chicago,” the bookkeeper said. “He told me to deliver the office keys and tell you that he’s left you in charge for tomorrow. I took the chance to bring you this.” He showed the parcel.
“You got my message, then? Assuming that’s what I think it is.”
“I did and it is, sir. I’ve done everything you asked.”
Sebastian ushered him in and led the way through to the kitchen, where he took a knife from the drawer.
“I hope it’s the right one,” Oakes said. “Everything else was either a uniform, or unfit for wear.”
Every Pinkerton office kept a stock of disguises for its operatives. In truth, these days it was more a part of the romance of the company than a feature of its day-to-day running, but there were still occasions when an employee might need to pass as a streetcar conductor or a factory hand, and needed quick access to the clothes to play the part. Sebastian slid the knife under the string and cut through it, and then he unwrapped the parcel on the kitchen table.
When the bundle opened up, it revealed a pair of brogues sitting on a more-or-less neatly folded suit. The suit had belonged to a temporary named Epps, who’d been sent into a construction company as an undercover
